Mr. Koob has a wide variety of learners in his classes, from his Period 1 of all ELL students (with languages like Spanish, Arabic, and various Hindi dialects) to his 7th Period class of 27 students who all have IEPs. Koob makes it clear that he thinks all of his students can succeed, and he puts in the time to make sure they can. He gives positive feedback whenever he can to his students, and even creates modified versions of tests for his First and Seventh Period classes. After tests are handed back, he discusses what went wrong and reteaches what he needs to before the underperforming classes have a retake if he thinks that is necessary. Mr. Koob is not going to let these kids just slide by with a D- without giving it his best shot first. I see him frequently apply the concepts he's teaching to a real-world scenario, not so much to show relevance but to show that "people do it all the time", and therefore that the students can too. It does seem to boost the confidence of the more skeptical students. Right now, the kids are learning about unit rates; looking at a price per amount of something to determine the price per ounce or gallon and so forth. Mr. Koob had the students fill out a worksheet in which they created their own imaginary party favor bags with whatever they wanted, but there had to be 27 bags of materials (the number of students in a class). Since most products are not sold in 27-packs, the students had to use the prices and container sizes they found online to calculate the unit price. They then multiplied the unit price of each object by 27 to find how much money they were spending. The kids were more interested because they could be creative and use the iPad cart for this assignment. The first day, kids had a lot of questions, but the last day they were wrapping up the project quickly with few problems. That's a definite sign of learning.
Toward the end of the week, I realized they didn't really need my help often, and neither did Mr. Koob, so I spent a lot of my time looking through the new Common Core standards for middle school and 9th grade that Mrs. Kembitzky sent me. I was shocked by how much the curriculum has been rearranged, and I am a little upset to see that my work with the Horizon student is not nearly as far as I had expected; While we are over halfway through the Algebra 1 class that I took a few years ago, we have barely started the year in comparison with the new standards. The concepts I've taught him are now considered 8th grade material; middle school has suddenly become BUSY years for students. I'm a little annoyed that everything is so different after just four years since I was learning this, but I guess that's something I'll learn to get used to as a teacher. Things are still going quite smoothly at Horizon, and I will be meeting with Mrs. Kembitzky on Monday to discuss the continuation of Steven's math education in future years.
Toward the end of the week, I realized they didn't really need my help often, and neither did Mr. Koob, so I spent a lot of my time looking through the new Common Core standards for middle school and 9th grade that Mrs. Kembitzky sent me. I was shocked by how much the curriculum has been rearranged, and I am a little upset to see that my work with the Horizon student is not nearly as far as I had expected; While we are over halfway through the Algebra 1 class that I took a few years ago, we have barely started the year in comparison with the new standards. The concepts I've taught him are now considered 8th grade material; middle school has suddenly become BUSY years for students. I'm a little annoyed that everything is so different after just four years since I was learning this, but I guess that's something I'll learn to get used to as a teacher. Things are still going quite smoothly at Horizon, and I will be meeting with Mrs. Kembitzky on Monday to discuss the continuation of Steven's math education in future years.